Abused Kids Just Another Fact of O.C. Life

It was a front-row courtroom seat I never wanted.

A 10-year-old girl, precious beyond belief, clutching both a cotton doll and a stuffed animal, calmly testifying two weeks ago about things her father had done to her the year before.

He was charged in Superior Court in Fullerton with nine counts of sexual assault and molestation. Sodomy, sexual intercourse and more. I was one of two alternate jurors. The day she testified I thought would be the saddest I’d ever spend in a courtroom.

Then the next day, it got worse.

Because the second day we viewed a videotape showing the little girl’s first confrontation about what happened, with a social worker from CAST--the county’s Child Abuse Services Team. Heart-wrenching, painful to watch. A child letting go secrets, inch by inch, that she’d shared before only with her diary.

As a juror, you have to remind yourself that you haven’t heard all the facts yet; the defense had yet to present its case. But as you listen to the horrors unfold, how can you not ask yourself: This is Orange County?

You bet, I’ve learned since the trial from Jeanie Ming, medical director for CAST. It interviews about 1,000 children each year, the majority sexually abused.

The county’s child-abuse registry showed about 25,000 child-abuse reports in 1999; more than 4,500 of those were about sexual abuse.

But the sad part, says Ming, is the children neither CAST nor the police ever get to see.

“Most cases of sexual abuse don’t go past the first report,” Ming said. “The child reports to the mom, and the mother decides to handle it herself. If it’s a neighbor, she’ll say, ‘We’ll just keep you away from him.’ ”

And if it’s the mom’s boyfriend, which is most often the case, the mother confronts him and warns him not to do it again.

I asked Ming, who has conducted thousands of physical examinations of these children, if many cases were as grave as the one I saw from the jury box.

It runs the gamut, she said. “Sometimes when you tell yourself you’ve seen it all, then another case comes along that you can hardly believe happened.”

The youngest sexual abuse she’s witnessed? A 1-month-old baby. Perhaps the most traumatic, she said, was an 18-month-old toddler, who instinctively reacted when her diaper was removed, fearful she was about to be molested again.

Not all police departments react the same to reports of sexual abuse of children, Ming said. Some send a social worker and police investigator right away; most of these send the child quickly to CAST. Others are slower to react; a few rarely use CAST.

“Our job is to reduce the child’s trauma during the investigative process,” Ming said. “We do crisis intervention. But what’s also important for most of these children is to get them into long-term counseling.”

Ming testified in the sex-abuse case I was on. Her job was to present physical evidence from the girl’s examination. She told me later it seemed to her the jurors were almost traumatized by it. I assured her she was right.

I confess with some shame that I showed up for jury duty hoping to get out of it. I’d sat on a civil panel six years before and found deliberations to be agonizing. I didn’t want to do it again. I had a whole speech planned why I’d be a bad choice.

But as Superior Court Judge Richard W. Stanford Jr. began questioning prospective jurors, my attitude changed. One after another, people wanted off that jury once they learned it was a child-molestation case. Some even insisted they would refuse to give the defendant a fair break, before hearing even a word of evidence. One said she couldn’t serve because the subject matter made her too uncomfortable.

“Do I look comfortable?” the judge responded sharply.

If we let jurors off a child-molestation case just because they were uncomfortable, the judge said, we’d all go home and we’d never have a trial.

So by the time my name was called late in the day, I tossed my speech aside. I didn’t want the judge to rank me with those dodging responsibility.

Fact-wise, it was not a difficult case. The father confessed to almost everything on videotape. As an alternate, I didn’t deliberate. But I wasn’t surprised when the jurors returned guilty verdicts on all nine counts in less than half a day.

Images from that trial will no doubt stay with all of us forever.

One for me was the marvelous sensitivity by Sue Pierce, the CAST social worker, in interviewing the girl on videotape. I’ve since learned that Pierce is such an expert, she teaches interview techniques all over the country.

The girl must have refused a dozen times to talk about what her father had done. Pierce patiently let the girl draw anything she wanted on a blackboard--she drew the planets, as I recall. Then Pierce slipped in her necessary questions (viewed by the police and others from a two-way mirror) and got the girl to answer through the blackboard.

When Pierce asked the girl if she wanted her father to have sex with her, she drew in large letters “NO WAY!!” with her own exclamation marks.

The most haunting image for me came when Pierce left the room. The videotape, taken when the girl was 9, showed her drawing away alone. With a chance to withdraw finally into her own world, she spontaneously broke into song: “Ki yi, yippee, yippee-yey, yippee-yey, ki yi, yippee-yippee-yey.”

That’s what a 9-year-old is supposed to be like. Safe, happy and free of danger from a father she had trusted to protect her.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling (714) 966-7789 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com